Edited by Todd Bradway. Text by Barry Schwabsky. Contributions by Susan A. Van Scoy, Robert R. Shane, Louise Sørensen.
From fantastical worlds to political topologies: a global survey of landscape painting in the 21st century
Although the fact may be surprising to some, landscape painting is positively thriving in the 21st century—indeed, the genre has arguably never felt as vital as it does today. The reasons why, if speculative, surely include our imminent environmental collapse and increasingly digitally mediated existence. Landscape Painting Now is the first book of its kind to take a global view of its subject, featuring more than eighty outstanding contemporary artists—both established and emerging—whose ages span seven decades and who hail from twenty-five different countries.
Through its thematic organization into six chapters—Realism and Beyond, Post-Pop Landscapes, New Romanticism, Constructed Realities, Abstracted Topographies, and Complicated Vistas—the book affords a generous window into the very best of contemporary landscape painting, from Cecily Brown’s sensual, fleshy landscapes to Peter Doig’s magic realist renderings of Trinidad, Maureen Gallace’s serene views of beach cottages and the foaming ocean, David Hockney’s radiant capturings of seasonal change in the English countryside, Julie Mehretu’s dynamically cartographic abstractions, Alexis Rockman’s mural-sized, postapocalyptic dioramas, and far beyond.
Landscape Painting Now features an extensive essay by Barry Schwabsky, art critic for The Nation. Schwabsky’s text weaves throughout the book, tracing the history of landscape painting from its origins in Eastern and Western art, through its transformation in the 20th century, to its present flourishing. Shorter texts by art historians Robert R. Shane, Louise Sørensen, and Susan A. Van Scoy introduce each artist, situating the importance of landscape within their practice and addressing key works. With over 400 color reproductions, including many details, this ambitious survey makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of landscape painting in our time.
Featured artists are Etel Adnan, Francis Alÿs, Hurvin Anderson, Mamma Andersson, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Lucas Arruda, Ayman Baalbaki, Jules de Balincourt, Ali Banisadr, Hernan Bas, John Beerman, Amy Bennett, Cecily Brown, Gillian Carnegie, Noa Charuvi, Nigel Cooke, Will Cotton, Cynthia Daignault, Verne Dawson, Vincent Desiderio, Lois Dodd, Peter Doig, Rackstraw Downes, Tim Eitel, Andreas Eriksson, Inka Essenhigh, Richard Estes, Genieve Figgis, Jane Freilicher, Barnaby Furnas, Maureen Gallace, Tim Gardner, Franz Gertsch, Adrian Ghenie, April Gornik, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Pat de Groot, Daniel Heidkamp, Barkley L. Hendricks, Israel Hershberg, David Hockney, Shara Hughes, Yvonne Jacquette, Merlin James, Yishai Jusidman, Alex Kanevsky, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Per Kirkeby, Makiko Kudo, Matvey Levenstein, Li Dafang, Liu Xiaodong, Damian Loeb, Antonio López García, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Julie Mehretu, Justin Mortimer, Maki Na Kamura, Jordan Nassar, Silke Otto-Knapp, Celia Paul, Eggert Pétursson, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Neo Rauch, Alexis Rockman, Jean-Pierre Roy, Tomás Sánchez, Lisa Sanditz, Serban Savu, George Shaw, Mark Tansey, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Wayne Thiebaud, Luc Tuymans, Cinta Vidal, Kay WalkingStick, Corinne Wasmuht, Matthew Wong, Jonas Wood, Lisa Yuskavage and Luiz Zerbini
Todd Bradway is an artist and editor based in New York. He was formerly Director of Title Acquisitions at D.A.P., where he worked for over twenty years, and more recently Director of Publishing at David Zwirner Books.
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include Heretics of Language (2018), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (2015).
Robert R. Shane received his Ph.D. in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University. His scholarly writing and art criticism have been published in sources including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Shambhala Times. He is currently Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, and former Managing Editor of the journal Art Criticism.
Louise Sørensen is a writer and editor specializing in contemporary art and the history and theory of photography. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and was Head of Research for the primary market division at David Zwirner from 2010-2017.
Susan A. Van Scoy is a professor of art history at St. Joseph's College, New York. She received her Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook and specializes in contemporary art and the history of photography.
Featured image is Jonas Wood, "Japanese Garden" (2017), courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Peter Malone
Above and beyond the volume's intelligence and visual sumptuousness, I believe Landscape Painting Now could play a significant role in our conversations about contemporary painting and its meaning.
Wall Street Journal
Half a century ago, artists focused more on soup cans and abstractions than on the scenes outside their studios. “Landscape Painting Now,” edited by Todd Bradway, shows how much things have changed.
Midwest Book Review
"Landscape Painting Now" affords a generous window into the very best of contemporary landscape painting.
New Criterion
Andrew L. Shea
With more than four hundred color reproductions, the book is beautifully illustrated and a fitting testament to the artists contained within.
Modern Art Notes Podcast
Tyler Green
It's one of those books that you're sure to see in painters' studios for years to come.
New York Magazine
The coffee-table book Landscape Painting Now: like having a country house, but without the Lyme risk.
My Modern Met
Sara Barnes
Landscape Painting Now features more than 80 contemporary artists who hail from 25 different countries to provide an inclusive and nuanced view.
The Arts Society
Ideal for scholars and art lovers, this ambitious work provides an invaluable guide to this ubiquitous subject.
Arts Society
In an age where anxieties about our environmental future dominate headlines, portrayals of the natural world in paintings are especially relevant today – and the genre is thriving. Pioneering in taking a global approach, this book – edited by artist Todd Bradway, with contributions from leading academic arts writers – offers the first comprehensive overview of contemporary landscape painting.
Galerie
Leading art critic Barry Schwabsky penned this colorful ode to the enduring appeal of landscape painting. Organized into six chapters, the book offers a leisurely read with insightful commentary on some 80 contemporary artists, both established and emerging, from Cecily Brown’s sensual scenes and David Hockney’s radiant depictions of the English countryside to Julie Mehretu’s cartographic abstractions.
Artspace
Deeply entrenched in a long and storied history, contemporary landscape artists also contend with the future—a future saddled with global warming and environmental catastrophe, as well as our increasingly virtual spaces. Maybe the genre is more vital now than it every has been—or that's what is seems like between the covers of Landscape Painting Now.
Library Journal
Sarah Stimson
A true visual treat... This is a good choice for readers seeking to expand their knowledge of contemporary painting, and for those looking to augment their library with a beautiful addition.
ARLIS/NA
Leslie Vega
Excellent curatorship…what Landscape Painting Now ultimately shows is that the tension between ourselves and “nature” can make for excellent painting.
Art Blog
Andrea Kirsh
This beautifully produced volume surveys landscape paintings in a wide variety of styles by eighty international artists working since the turn of the millennium.. The book demonstrates the range of ideas with which artists invest landscapes beyond either realistic representation or romantic escapism.
Wall Street Journal
Peter Saenger
Half a century ago, artists focused more on soup cans and abstractions than on the scenes outside their studios. “Landscape Painting Now,” edited by Todd Bradway, shows how much things have changed.
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This week, Acquavella Galleries opens Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes, a group exhibition presented concurrently at both its New York City and Palm Beach locations from April 21 to June 10 and April 15 to May 25, respectively. The exhibitions are curated by Todd Bradway, editor of Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, and feature works by 28 contemporary artists. continue to blog
Makiko Kudo’s “Burning Red” (2012) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, our best-selling 2019 survey edited by Todd Bradway and the genesis for Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes, the show Bradway has curated for Aquavella Galleries in Palm Springs and New York City right now. “The wide-eyed girls who populate Makiko Kudo’s landscapes are the witnesses more than protagonists of stories that might take place within them,” Barry Schwabsky writes; “we see the verdant scene as though from their point of view: a double consciousness of a familiar place where, she says, ‘the scenery is shining in my eyes… burned into my brain.’ It is a hyperreality enjoined by feeling rather than by minute attention to details; what ties it to Pop is not the banality of the everyday but quite the opposite, a childlike wonder at even the most ordinary things (which, for instance, Warhol projected onto the Campbell’s soup his mother gave him for lunch every day as a kid).” continue to blog
In April, D.A.P. published Landscape Painting Now, a big, bold and deceptively smart global survey of the genre that's been on our bestseller list ever since. We sat down to speak with the book's editor, Todd Bradway, this week to discuss the three-year process of making of the book, painting in general, and his steady rise from scrappy D.A.P. intern in 1994 to one of the most respected art book makers working today. continue to blog
Amy Bennett's "Nothing New under the Sun" (2016) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, our not-so-sleepy contemporary landscape painting survey, which released last week. Included in primary author Barry Schwabsky's chapter on Constructed Realities, Bennett's work sits beside paintings by Will Cotton, Cinta Vidal, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Merlin James, Gillian Carnegie, Alex Kanevsky, Adrian Ghenie, Lisa Yuskavage, Inka Essenhigh, Mark Tansey, Vincent Desiderio, Justin Mortimer and Jean-Pierre Roy. "Paintings that highlight their own constructedness never let you take too seriously the old picture-as-window idea," Schwabsky writes. "They keep reminding you that, whatever you think you see in them, you're never just seeing through them; you have to see how they make their propositions about reality in order to judge them, and that means you have to see that the proposition about reality is also a proposition about poiesis, which is simply the Greek word for "making." continue to blog
"Untitled" (2016) by Etel Adnan is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, published by D.A.P. Edited by Todd Bradway with text by Barry Schwabsky, alongside contributions from Susan A. Van Scoy, Robert R. Shane and Louise Sørensen, this is the book on contemporary landscape painting, featuring work by more than 80 artists, from nonagenarians like Adnan to established figures such as David Hockney, Mamma Andersson and Peter Doig, to rising stars like Jordan Nassar and Shara Hughes. "For Adnan," Schwabsky writes, "her mountain may be a specific empirical place that she has contemplated over much of her life, but for viewers of the painting it is a kind of archetype of MOUNTAIN, an idea sensuously embodied—or as the artist's partner Simone Fattal once put it, 'the ever-revealing mystery, the ongoing manifestation.'" continue to blog
The end of summer is always bittersweet. Especially now, with so much up in the air. Sunsets come earlier, mornings are cooler, and all of the questions you've been dreading—about school, and work, and real life—such as it is—loom. We’re holding on to these last dreamy, end-in-sight days with Daniel Heidkamp’s time-stopping paintings from Landscape Painting Now. Featured image, from the chapter on Post-Pop Landscapes, is “Red Veranda” (2017). continue to blog
Hernan Bas's "A Landscape to Swallow You Whole" (2011) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, the D.A.P. new release launching in April at the Whitney Museum of American Art. "Hernan Bas's mixed-media works combine silkscreen, block printing and paint to make landscape a realm for the supernatural and sinister," we read in the book. "Growing up in Miami, Bas was exposed to local folklore about UFO, werewolf and Bigfoot sightings in the Florida wetlands, which inspired his interest in the occult. Bas, who is openly gay, is known for featuring young male waifs and dandies drawn from literary works by Oscar Wilde and J.K. Huysmans in small-scale, sexually fraught narratives; in his later works, the landscape assumes a larger, more spiritual role and themes have become more universal." continue to blog
Fall is in the air, and we can think of no better artwork than Inka Essenhigh’s “Yellow Fall” (2007) to celebrate the weird, dynamic feeling that comes with the changes of this particular season. “Employing a mix of narration, symbolism and mystery, her paintings explore what is known about nature and what lurks beyond our perception,” Robert R. Shane writes in Landscape Painting Now. He quotes the artist directly: “The unknown comes from the painting process, putting brush to canvas. I do have an agenda, and a world I want to create. I’m not interested in meaninglessness. I am looking for the feeling that I’m in collaboration with something that is separate from me, that I can access within my imagination.” continue to blog
Lois Dodd's "Water Sunset, Blair Pond" (2008) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, launching Wednesday, April 17, from 7–9 PM at the Whitney Shop with a panel featuring Dodd, Verne Dawson, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Matthew Wong and author and moderator, Barry Schwabsky. "A complete agreement between the reality of the painting and the reality of what is depicted would be illusionism, not realism," Schwabsky writes. "A painting by Antonio López García, Rackstraw Downes or Lois Dodd may on the surface seem closer to a conventional view of the 'reality' of a vista than one by Soutine or Giacometti, and yet they too are constantly clarifying that the work of observational painting is a constant and never completely resolvable tension between two and three dimensions and between simultaneity and time." continue to blog
Enrique Martínez Celaya's "The Empire" (2015) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, launching Wednesday, April 17, from 7–9 PM at the Whitney Shop with a panel featuring Martínez Celaya, Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Matthew Wong and author and moderator Barry Schwabsky. "Trained as a scientist, [Martínez Celaya] imbues his work with the philosophical and spiritual issues that fascinate him," Schwabsky writes, "with roots ranging from the Catholicism of his Cuban forebears through American Transcendentalism to the hermeneutics and ontology of Martin Heidegger. Martínez Celaya remarks that much of his work involves 'the feeling of having arrived too late;' this too-lateness is what gives his art its poignancy. It has a double meaning when the works involve landscape: first, there's the sense that, while the painting does not convey a narrative, there was an event or a story that took place, as it were, just before we arrived on the scene, something that left its echo but remains in itself elusive. More than that, it's as if we might be too late for the landscape as such, that we may have arrived just in time to bid it farewell. This sad reflection could be an inevitable part of our relation to the earth and to images of the earth in the twenty-first century. And yet, as long as someone remains as a witness, there is still something to see, something haunting: 'The landscape itself,' Martínez Celaya says, 'inhabits me as a ghost.'" continue to blog
Matthew Wong's "Untitled" (2016) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, launching tonight, Wednesday, April 17, from 7–9 PM, at the Whitney Shop with a panel featuring Wong, Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor and author and moderator Barry Schwabsky. "Matthew Wong… says he starts each painting without any idea of what he will paint," Schwabsky writes. "Explaining, 'I may just pick a few colors at hand and squeeze them onto the surface, blindly making marks, but at a certain point I will inexplicably get a very fleeting glimpse of what the image I may finally arrive at will be, sort of like a hallucination,' he sounds more like an Abstract Expressionist (de Kooning: 'Content is a glimpse') than a Pop artist, yet his densely woven webs of variegated painterly marks add up to places that look uncannily familiar… Wong's paintings are usually inhabited by a figure who might be interpreted as the artist's avatar—a personage trying to find a way through a world that might be one's own hallucination or someone else's video game. In the Post-Pop landscape, reality and what the outsider artist Henry Darger called 'the realms of the unreal' are inherently porous." continue to blog
Alison Elizabeth Taylor's Only Castles Burning… (2017) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, one of our top ten Holiday Gift Books for Art Lovers, 2019. Edited by Todd Bradway with primary texts by Barry Schwabsky and contributions by Susan A. Van Scoy, Robert R. Shane and Louise Sørensen, this ambitious 368-page survey features work by more than 80 contemporary artists—both established and emerging—whose ages span seven decades and who hail from 25 different countries. We are proud to say it's been a critic's pick at a wide diversity of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Library Journal, New Criterion, New York Magazine and Hyperallergic, where Peter Malone writes, "above and beyond the volume’s intelligence and visual sumptuousness, I believe Landscape Painting Now, could play a significant role in our conversations about contemporary painting and its meaning." continue to blog
Verne Dawson's "Pagans" (2009–10) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, launching Wednesday, April 17, from 7–9 PM at the Whitney, where a panel discussion with Dawson, Lois Dodd, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Matthew Wong and author and moderator Barry Schwabsky will be followed by a signing. "The folksy style of Verne Dawson's paintings veils considerable esoteric erudition, a scholarly eye for the intellectual content of traditional culture," Schwabsky writes. "I keep playing around with numbers, math and astronomy, and how they show up in art and culture," Dawson is quoted. "Often I'll paint fairy tales, making sure all the attributes are right so the knowledge gets passed on. That's where this mathematical and astronomical information often finds itself, in fairy tales and folktales." continue to blog
Pat de Groot's "spring blue" (2001) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, one of our summer-time staff favorites. De Groot's paintings "can seem almost abstract," Barry Schwabsky writes, "but as she has said, 'They are done from what is happening: the color, the wave action, the wind, the sky and the horizon,' and for that reason, 'I have to move with the changes until I get something that looks pretty much all right.' In some of these paintings, we could be looking at nothing, or everything—but nothing in between." continue to blog
Inspired by Ditch Plains Beach in Montauk, Long Island, Daniel Heidkamp's "Memory Dune" (2017) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, our pick for mothers, painters and contemporary art lovers everywhere. "Heidkamp delights in capturing the timelessness of contemporary scenes—his paintings are more than landscapes in that they record the rich history of a place with Fauvist-like, saturated colors marinating in their site-specificity," Susan A. Van Scoy writes, noting that he is attracted to locations that behave like "an 'art vortex' for their strong scenery, light, character and historical nature." continue to blog
"For over fifteen years, Lisa Sanditz's pulsating, Kool Aid-colored landscapes have captured the intersection between the natural world and built environments and its effect on food production, consumption, ecology and the economy," Susan A. Van Scoy writes in Mother's Day staff favorite, Landscape Painting Now. "Sanditz travels to diverse places—single-industry cities in China, junk food factories in Arizona, industrial sites in Miami—and collects artifacts, smells, tastes and stories, making sketches and taking photographs, then returns to her studio to replicate the human action on the land, using what she calls her 'painterly moves.'" Sanditz came up with the idea for Fumigation Tents (2016), pictured here, while driving around Los Angeles, where termite extermination tents are common. "The whimsical landscape is dotted with a number of these tents," Van Scoy writes, "but color seeping out of their lines as well as aerosol spray-paint marks at the top of the painting hint at their deadly purpose." continue to blog
Makiko Kudo’s “Burning Red” (2012) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, our best-selling 2019 survey edited by Todd Bradway and the genesis for Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes, the show Bradway has curated for Aquavella Galleries in Palm Springs and New York City right now. “The wide-eyed girls who populate Makiko Kudo’s landscapes are the witnesses more than protagonists of stories that might take place within them,” Barry Schwabsky writes; “we see the verdant scene as though from their point of view: a double consciousness of a familiar place where, she says, ‘the scenery is shining in my eyes… burned into my brain.’ It is a hyperreality enjoined by feeling rather than by minute attention to details; what ties it to Pop is not the banality of the everyday but quite the opposite, a childlike wonder at even the most ordinary things (which, for instance, Warhol projected onto the Campbell’s soup his mother gave him for lunch every day as a kid).” continue to blog
Shara Hughes’ “Tipsy” (2016) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, the summertime staff favorite from D.A.P. Publishing. Hughes’ worlds “are in perpetual flux,” Robert R. Shane writes, “as colorful forms morph into one another, an effect that echoes her improvisational and playful process and is reinforced by her collage-like combination of materials and techniques, including oil paint, dye, airbrushing and enamels.… The childlike quality of the mark-making underscores the sense of youthful imagination and spontaneity that Hughes achieves; yet, as in so much of her work, there is also the sense of something terrifying emerging from the anxious brushstrokes.” continue to blog
Berlin-based Corrine Wasmuht’s “Llanganuco Falls” (2008) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, the D.A.P. blockbuster edited by Todd Bradway. (Read an interview with Bradway here.) Barry Schwabsky writes, “In the century or more since the inception of abstract painting, there has been a constant tension, a push and pull between the desire to hold on to the sources of abstract pictorial space in embodied experiences of vision, as for instance in landscape, and the equally compelling desire to see the new spatial possibilities proposed by abstraction as fundamentally distinct from what those sources made possible.” He describes Wasmuht’s massive panoramas as “woven together from quantities of source imagery so that the engulfing space seems equal parts video game, street scene and shopping mall—exterior, interior and virtual all at once.” continue to blog
Will Cotton's "Forest" (2003) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, a featured title at our bookstore at Frieze New York 2019. "A picture—above all a painted picture—can be an experience," Barry Schwabsky writes, "in one way for the person who makes it and in other ways for the people who come into contact with it. The gesture of offering one kind of experience as a way of conveying an idea about a different one is a species of metaphor, and that seems to be the spirit in which many of today's painters of landscape present their works. A landscape painting is not necessarily a representation of a landscape, but rather something that, in being constructed out of pieces of representation, or possibly just echoes of former representations, kindles an experience of its own—one that, as those fragments of resemblance suggest, is somehow like an experience of nature." continue to blog
May 2-5, 2019:ARTBOOK and König Books, two of the world's great art booksellers, come together for five short days at Frieze New York on Randall's Island! Located just inside the South Entrance, our combined pop-up bookstore features dozens of titles, brought in on a special container ship, which have not yet released in the United States. These are surrounded by the best new titles of 2019, rare books, affordable backlist classics, limited editions and signed copies! We are also stocking a selection of books on or by speakers at the fair, including Saidiya Hartman, Aruna D’Souza, Andrew Durbin, Valeria Luiselli and Sheila Heti. Private preview is Wednesday, May 1. Buy tickets here. continue to blog
Wednesday, April 17 from 7–9PM, the Whitney Shop and D.A.P. Publishing present the launch of Landscape Painting Now with a panel discussion featuring Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor and Matthew Wong, moderated by author Barry Schwabsky. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 11 x 10.25 in. / 368 pgs / 420 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $91 ISBN: 9781942884262 PUBLISHER: D.A.P. AVAILABLE: 4/23/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Landscape Painting Now From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism
Published by D.A.P.. Edited by Todd Bradway. Text by Barry Schwabsky. Contributions by Susan A. Van Scoy, Robert R. Shane, Louise Sørensen.
From fantastical worlds to political topologies: a global survey of landscape painting in the 21st century
Although the fact may be surprising to some, landscape painting is positively thriving in the 21st century—indeed, the genre has arguably never felt as vital as it does today. The reasons why, if speculative, surely include our imminent environmental collapse and increasingly digitally mediated existence. Landscape Painting Now is the first book of its kind to take a global view of its subject, featuring more than eighty outstanding contemporary artists—both established and emerging—whose ages span seven decades and who hail from twenty-five different countries.
Through its thematic organization into six chapters—Realism and Beyond, Post-Pop Landscapes, New Romanticism, Constructed Realities, Abstracted Topographies, and Complicated Vistas—the book affords a generous window into the very best of contemporary landscape painting, from Cecily Brown’s sensual, fleshy landscapes to Peter Doig’s magic realist renderings of Trinidad, Maureen Gallace’s serene views of beach cottages and the foaming ocean, David Hockney’s radiant capturings of seasonal change in the English countryside, Julie Mehretu’s dynamically cartographic abstractions, Alexis Rockman’s mural-sized, postapocalyptic dioramas, and far beyond.
Landscape Painting Now features an extensive essay by Barry Schwabsky, art critic for The Nation. Schwabsky’s text weaves throughout the book, tracing the history of landscape painting from its origins in Eastern and Western art, through its transformation in the 20th century, to its present flourishing. Shorter texts by art historians Robert R. Shane, Louise Sørensen, and Susan A. Van Scoy introduce each artist, situating the importance of landscape within their practice and addressing key works. With over 400 color reproductions, including many details, this ambitious survey makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of landscape painting in our time.
Featured artists are Etel Adnan, Francis Alÿs, Hurvin Anderson, Mamma Andersson, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Lucas Arruda, Ayman Baalbaki, Jules de Balincourt, Ali Banisadr, Hernan Bas, John Beerman, Amy Bennett, Cecily Brown, Gillian Carnegie, Noa Charuvi, Nigel Cooke, Will Cotton, Cynthia Daignault, Verne Dawson, Vincent Desiderio, Lois Dodd, Peter Doig, Rackstraw Downes, Tim Eitel, Andreas Eriksson, Inka Essenhigh, Richard Estes, Genieve Figgis, Jane Freilicher, Barnaby Furnas, Maureen Gallace, Tim Gardner, Franz Gertsch, Adrian Ghenie, April Gornik, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Pat de Groot, Daniel Heidkamp, Barkley L. Hendricks, Israel Hershberg, David Hockney, Shara Hughes, Yvonne Jacquette, Merlin James, Yishai Jusidman, Alex Kanevsky, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Per Kirkeby, Makiko Kudo, Matvey Levenstein, Li Dafang, Liu Xiaodong, Damian Loeb, Antonio López García, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Julie Mehretu, Justin Mortimer, Maki Na Kamura, Jordan Nassar, Silke Otto-Knapp, Celia Paul, Eggert Pétursson, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Neo Rauch, Alexis Rockman, Jean-Pierre Roy, Tomás Sánchez, Lisa Sanditz, Serban Savu, George Shaw, Mark Tansey, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Wayne Thiebaud, Luc Tuymans, Cinta Vidal, Kay WalkingStick, Corinne Wasmuht, Matthew Wong, Jonas Wood, Lisa Yuskavage and Luiz Zerbini
Todd Bradway is an artist and editor based in New York. He was formerly Director of Title Acquisitions at D.A.P., where he worked for over twenty years, and more recently Director of Publishing at David Zwirner Books.
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include Heretics of Language (2018), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (2015).
Robert R. Shane received his Ph.D. in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University. His scholarly writing and art criticism have been published in sources including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Shambhala Times. He is currently Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, and former Managing Editor of the journal Art Criticism.
Louise Sørensen is a writer and editor specializing in contemporary art and the history and theory of photography. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and was Head of Research for the primary market division at David Zwirner from 2010-2017.
Susan A. Van Scoy is a professor of art history at St. Joseph's College, New York. She received her Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook and specializes in contemporary art and the history of photography.